Why does Gaia GPS appear to always be running in the Task Manager?

Why does Gaia GPS appear to always be running in my Task Manager?

Gaia will often appear as "idle" in your Task Manager, but it's not running and hence not consuming CPU/battery. Any service with state "idle" means that it has completed its lifecycle, but Android has not offloaded it from its "app/service history list".

Gaia GPS will usually appear in a Task Manager because its map download service works in the background. So, on start-up or when the network state changes, Gaia will check for downloads, and then go idle and do nothing if there are no maps to download.

This service is activated on 3 events:

When user explicitly start/resume new map download

When the phone boots (checks for downloads to resume)

When network state changes - edge/3G/4G/wifi connect/disconnect (checks for downloads to resume)